


We build castles with our fears and sleep in them like kings and queens

by TheLionInMyBed



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Character Study, Female Friendship, Finwe's daughters deserved better, Gen, if nothing else they deserved some fucking screentime, in the face of a horrifying uncaring world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-11 00:00:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10450461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLionInMyBed/pseuds/TheLionInMyBed
Summary: Idril is afraid. The fear was with her when the world went dark and dogged her steps across the Grinding Ice. The Glorious Battle did not slay it and Gondolin's high walls didn't keep it out.Idril is afraid, but Idril has a politician's mask, a clever mind, a sword. Better than that, she had bold aunts and a wise mother - if anything will save her, it is they.





	

Idril loved her great grandfather’s palace; its vast green lawns, perfect for running upon barefoot; its libraries full of sweet-smelling books with soft leather covers, bright illustrations and words that she could almost read; its hidden nooks and forgotten passages where a child could so easily disappear herself.

It was a good thing too, since she was scarcely allowed to leave it anymore. Her father would not say why but Idril was very good at eavesdropping and even if she hadn’t been, often enough everyone was shouting loud enough she did not need to.

They were shouting now, her grandfather and her great aunt, and Idril pressed herself flat against the column she was hiding behind, her hands over her mouth so she would not cry and give herself away.

Her grandfather’s voice, so loud moments before, was gone low and placatory. “Sister, be calm-”

“Be calm?” snarled kind, placid Auntie Findis. “Your followers are brawling in the streets and you tell _me_ to be calm? How long before there’s a death?”

“I wish this no more than you,” said Grandfather gently. “It is Fëanor’s doing-”

“Of _course_ it’s Fëanor’s doing, but it takes two to stage a duel. You call him too volatile to rule - and I agree! - but you’re acting little better.”

“I’m not going to roll over and let him have his way. I do not expect you to understand-”

“Why would I not? I am as much a child of Finwë as you or he, no matter that I have not felt the need to take our father’s name twice over!”

“That’s what this comes back to, isn’t it? This isn’t about our people at all, it is about you being denied something.”

“How _dare_ you try to turn this back on me!” Findis said, her voice rising to a shriek. “I have borne humiliation upon humiliation while you and Fëanor foment civil war and you accuse _me_ of selfishness?”

Idril sobbed, loud enough that they both heard her and went silent. She hadn’t meant to but the palace was supposed to be _safe_ , her father had promised, and adults were supposed to be wise, not as angry and petulant as she and Orodreth squabbling over toys.

“Findis, if we can’t talk without you becoming hysterical then I have nothing more to say,” said her grandfather with icy courtesy. “Please see to your niece.” He turned upon his heel.

Findis bit at her lower lip, fists clenching and unclenching at her sides. And then she crossed the floor, hard shoes clacking upon the marble, and scooped Idril up into her arms.

“I’m sorry,” Idril told her, sniffing. “I was afraid.”

Findis wiped away her tears with a sleeve scratchy with embroidery. “There’s no shame in being afraid, Celebrindal,” she said. “But you must never let it show. See how they turn it back against you?”

***

Years later, after the sparks had caught and kindled, she looked down at her mother’s body and remembered her Great Aunt’s words. There were practical reasons not to cry too; her tears would freeze upon her cheeks.

Elenwë of the Vanyar had been a practical woman, steel beneath her gilded hair. She had stripped off her jewels to make bright little cairns to mark the lost, torn up her fine silks to bandage frostbite. She had stitched seal hides until her soft fingers bled and hardened, rubbed her skin with stinking fat to guard against the cold. Nothing, though, not her kindness nor her pragmatism had mattered at the last.

“Aren’t you frightened?” Idril had asked her mother when they first set out.

“Oh no, dear. I haven’t the time,” Elenwë said and sent Idril off down the line to see if Malgelir had any spare fishhooks.

“Rassel died in the night.” Idril’s eyes burned from holding back her tears and there was a crust of frozen snot upon her upper lip.

“We’ll need to check in on Fuirthel then, she’ll be distraught,” her mother said, wiping her nose with a mittened hand. “Let’s bring that block of seal fat with us - I know it’s not a traditional guest gift but we must make do with what we’ve got.”

“Arranith says we were fools to come and that the Ice has no end,” Idril told her ten years in, as they huddled together beneath their furs. “She says we’re all going to die.”

“Arranith should know better than to spread that about,” said her mother and asked her to tally up their grain stores. It was not until much later, after she had counted every last bag that Idril realised she had not disagreed.

“Stop trying to put me off,” she cried, storming into their tent with a flurry of snowflakes dancing about her heels. “I’m not a child, you don’t need to cosset me!” Her voice hitched and cracked making her sound like a little girl even to herself.

“I’m not trying to cosset you, Idril Turgoniel,” said her mother, proud in her ragged furs. “You are a princess of the Noldor and that means you must _lead_. You must be calm and brave in the face of adversity and if you cannot be brave then you must be too busy to be afraid. You must be your people's strength.”

“Great Aunt Findis said to never let them see me cry,” Idril sniffed.

“Your great aunt is a clever woman.”

A hundred thousand miles and twelve years later, Idril stood over her mother’s corpse and watched herself react. “We will need to be more careful,” she said. “We must send teams ahead to check for more ice with ridges like that.”

There was a murmur of agreement. Idril knelt in the snow beside her father. “We can load her into one of the sleighs,” she said. “And when the ice gets thicker we can cut blocks to make a tomb. He nodded but she and Finrod had to pry the corpse from his arms.

Idril did cry, of course, but only much later when she was out of sight and had run out of things to do.

***

“I want to learn to fight,” she told her Great Aunt Lalwen. A sword would not have saved her mother. It might have saved her uncle, though. Argon had been younger than she but he had fought and died while she sat helpless, hidden in with the rest of their baggage.

Lalwen laughed. It rarely meant she was amused. “I suppose it would be foolish to ask what brought this on.”

“I don’t want to be afraid,” Idril said.

“A sword won’t save you from fear. Nor should it. Fear keeps us alive, Celebrindal.”

Already there were ballads of the Battle of the Lammoth. Idril had helped prepare her uncle’s corpse, cutting away soiled, stinking clothes and easing twisted limbs into sleeves of beaded velvet, braiding hair to fall so that it hid the shattered skull. Afterwards, she had sat beside her father as they celebrated their victory, mirroring her grandfather’s expression of grim triumph. She had applauded the bards that sang of his boldness - for he had been bold - and youth - for he had been very young. They had not sung what the soldiers whispered; that the battle had been won already when the boy broke ranks in search of glory.

“Fear is like water,” Idril said. “A little keeps you alive but too much will choke you.”

Her great aunt tilted her head to one side, considering, the light catching upon the opals in her hair and the lenses balanced upon her nose. “Wisely spoken, little niece. Come find me at first light tomorrow.

Lalwen had first picked up a sword in Valinor, studying the old forms carried from the East in the minds and calloused hands of those that had made the Journey. Idril did not know when the interest had begun but she knew her aunt and doubted it was entirely academic for all her love of the old tales. The fear they had known in Aman, in the days of the unrest, was as nothing to the fear that they knew now but the children of Indis had had better reason than most to guard their backs.

“And yet you followed him,” said Idril the next morning, as she and Lalwen broke their fast. She was exhausted and her hands were blistered, knuckles bloody, but they did not shake at all about her mug of tea.

“‘The deeds that we shall do shall be the matter of song until the last days of Arda,’ my brother said and in that he did not err.” Lalwen forked bacon into her mouth and daintily blotted grease from her lips with the closest rag to hand, the one she used to hone her blades - they were both princesses after all. “How could I not bear witness to this?”

“Do you want a song of your own?” Idril asked her.

“I know better than that,” said her aunt. “Our stories wrap us up like shrouds until all anyone sees is the vaguest shape of the person that was. I almost feel sorry for Fëanor! Better to be forgotten than remembered as he will be.”

Young Argon’s shroud was fine indeed, Idril thought and shuddered though the Sun was long into her voyage.

She learnt to use a blade passing well. She would win no glory from it and nor did she wish to, but the sure knowledge of the calluses on her palms and the new grace of her feet was a comfort. She thought now if it came to it - _when_ it came to it - she would not die cowering, a scion of Finwë not a rabbit beneath a stooping hawk.

When it came to it for her aunt, fighting in her brother’s van in the last hours of the Dagor Aglareb, Idril prepared her body too. She sorted through her rooms, sending histories borrowed and never returned back to their libraries, gowns and linens and furniture to those that had a need for them, and the journals and personal papers she had burnt against the depredations of curious loremasters.

Her aunt’s sword, though, that she kept and did not tell her father.

***

“I’m dying,” said Aredhel. “Don’t tell your father.” She winked so that they might pretend it was a joke.

Idril took her aunt’s hand and winced for the grip was strong yet, despite the clamminess of her fingers. Neither she nor Aredhel had any gift for healing but she thought the words were true. “What can I do?” she asked.

Aredhel’s eyes were bright, seeming almost to burn in her wan face. “Remember me. Not the things they will say after. Remember _me_.”

“I will,” said Idril. “I will. You never would let me forget that you once killed two stags with a single shot. And no one would let _you_ forget that you broke your arm falling out of Great Grandmother’s cherry trees. Twice because you tried it again before it was fully healed. Or the time Galadriel bet that you couldn’t swim across the strait to Tol Eressëa and you almost drowned proving her wrong.”

“I made it, though.”

“You did.”

“You’re a good girl, Idril. And horribly precocious. Remember that I said that too.”

Idril had not cried since she was a child. She would not weep now. “I’ll remember.”

“Well that’s my legacy taken care of,” Aredhel said, still light, still smiling. “As to you, promise me, Celebrindal, that those feet remember how to run.”

‘Run to _where?_ ’ Idril almost said, but she remembered what her mother had taught her, kept her face a lovely mask and held her tongue.

“There’ll be no rescue,” said Aredhel, and her eyes were those of a vixen brought to bay, so fierce and fearful. “No escape you don’t contrive for yourself. Am I frightening you?”

Idril thought of a gleam of white flame, trapped and smothered by branches and dark water, flickering out in this stuffy sickroom. “Yes.”

“ _Good_. I wish I could do more for you. I always thought to teach my children to be bold, but what good did boldness do me?”

“I’m sorry,” said Idril, who had never been bold, who was pretty and demure and afraid down to her bones.

“Varda’s tits, don’t _you_ apologise,” Aredhel said so brusquely that Idril giggled, nervous and too shrill. “I love you,” her aunt went on. “You must remember that as well.”

Aredhel had cared for Idril upon the Ice after her mother had fallen. She could never have replaced Elenwë and had not tried. Instead, she was an elder sister, bold, garrulous and irreverent. She had shown Idril snow foxes at play, shown her how to shoot and skin and cure their hides, and given her a pair of fine soft mittens at the end of it. Idril still had them somewhere, in one of her trunks. Too small now and all the fur worn off from how much she’d worn them. “I love you too,” Idril said and threw herself forwards to wrap her arms about her.

Her aunt said ‘oof’ and hugged her back, too gently, with arms that had forgotten how to hold a bow or wield a spear. Idril breathed in the smell of her hair, trying to fix it in her mind. She had not had a chance to say goodbye to her mother. She should be grateful she was allowed this much.

“Will you fetch Lómion?” Aredhel said at last.

Idril froze.

Aredhel rubbed her back soothingly - she had never been soothing _before_ and Idril hated it. “He needs to say goodbye too,” she said. “None of it was his fault.”

Idril did not trust herself to speak and so she nodded and gave her aunt’s hand one last squeeze and slipped from the room to find her cousin.

And then, because she was pretty and demure but was not stupid, she had them bring out the old cedar chest of baubles from her childhood. The mittens were there and she pressed them to her face, breathing in the sweet smell of cedarwood and the mustiness of old fur.

In Gondolin, safe behind great walls and seven gates, it was easy to feel forget but beneath old toys and ragged sealskin slippers, wrapped in faded Vanyarin silks, lay a Noldorin blade, still keen despite the long years of disuse.

She was afraid again, as she had not been in centuries, her hands clenched tight around the sword's hilt, her feet itching with the need to run.

This time she did not try to fight it down.

***

She had thought to go down fighting.

That she hadn’t died in defence of her father’s city, as a desperate rearguard to her son, came as something of a surprise. It left her all adrift.

The fear in her could not be fought nor fled and masking it grew harder every day. She’d hacked and parried until her arms went numb and she could no longer lift her sword, run until her feet wore through the soles of the shoes she’d had to don, held her face set in a look of dignified determination so long it felt that it would stick that way, like one of her great aunt’s sculptures.

Better not to dwell upon her great aunt, though, or the uncles she’d been fond of before the Darkening and the Ice. Some of them she had even been fond of afterwards. Even so, when her ragged band of refugees arrived at the mouth of the river Sirion and heard what had been done, she could not find it in herself to be surprised.

After the balrogs and the great serpents wrought of steel, after the toppling towers of the city she had helped to build and the screaming of the people she had lead and failed to save, she’d thought there was nothing left that could daunt her.

True enough, but it took all the courage she had ever learnt to gather up her threadbare finery and curtsey before the throne of the child-queen of the Sindar.

“A star shines upon our meeting,” said the girl. Her voice was high and thin, untrained. She looked no older than ten but would be younger still if the mortal blood held true in her as it did in Idril’s own son.

“We are most grateful, Lady Elwing, for your welcome,” Idril said, low and slow with all the poise that she possessed, still holding that deep curtsey.

“In these times- in these dark times we are-” the child broke off, looked desperately over Idril’s shoulder to where, she guessed, a nurse must wait. “We are glad to have the friendship of the Noldor.”

That might have been a deliberate barb upon another tongue, but surely it did not come from the girl, and so Idril let her warm smile flicker not at all. “You will not find us ungracious guests. Anything that we may offer - stonecraft for the building of your walls, metalwork for the shaping of your weapons, textiles for the garbing of a fair young queen - shall be yours.” She did not speak of Noldorin gemcraft.

Elwing’s lips moved, shaping words that died stillborn. Idril thought she saw the ghosts of Eluréd and Elurín and was grateful when the girl flinched back against her driftwood throne without speaking their names. “Thank you,” she said in her whisper of a voice.

“That will be all,” said the steward, stood beside her,” and Idril dropped her curtsey even deeper, rose and swept away.

It was good sense to strengthen bonds between them by teaching the Sindar what they would learn of smithing. It was even better to learn what they would teach of boats and sailing.

It was the politician’s gambit and a mother’s care that had her send young Prince Eärendil to the rough-built palace to take counsel with the Queen, or to play chase, and tops and counters with her - both suited Idril’s purpose.

It was not shrewdness or foresight that had her wandering the docks one morning, before the rising of Arien or any of Sirion’s fisherfolk, but later she might tell herself it was. Foresight was better than waking in a cold sweat, feet itching, fists clenched so tightly the sheets tore. If she’d started sooner, told more people, fought harder-

But that was done. And now there was a little girl, crouched upon the sand not a hundred yards ahead. Black hair whipped into a tangle, white skirts tossed about like spume.

“Where are your guards, Lady Elwing?” Idril called, approaching slowly, lest Elwing startle.

“Asleep.” The girl’s voice was thick and, when she turned, her face was blotchy, sticky with salt and snot. Her eyes were Sindar-dark, made luminous with tears.

Idril scuffed her feet into the sand and felt something scuttle over her bare toes. “Why aren’t you?”

“I was afraid.”

“There is no shame in fear,” said Idril, kneeling to wipe the girl’s streaming eyes upon her sleeve. “But you must learn to use it.”

 _I will show you how_.

**Author's Note:**

> On [tumblr](http://thelioninmybed.tumblr.com), come say hi!


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